Daniel Warner

Ambient Cultures & Imagined Spaces:
Three Digital Installations

Profitti Distrutti, Wall of Sound, digital
photograph, inkjet print, 3'x4', 2001/2005

On the Conduct of Water

On the Conduct of Water is a digital multimedia installation about water, sonically, metaphorically, and philosophically. The phenomena of water and sound are fascinating in that they both figure the irreclaimable. As the philosopher observed, “you cannot jump into the same water twice.” Like water, sound waves disperse around the body and this circumfusion is never caught entirely by the ear. In contrast, technology always promises exactitude. Recording technologies allow us to incompletely grasp sounds and images but it is only in the imaginative reworking of transformed sound and image that we can move with rather than against these enigmas. This is the evolving promise of digital art.


Pre-text: Pursuing a long-standing interest in the history of garden and landscape architecture, I came across the index of John Evelyn's seventeenth century treatise Elysium Britannicum and was drawn to an entry called, evocatively, "On the Conduct of Water." I imagined the installation, its sounds and images in an instant as they played off the multiple meanings of “conduct” as an activity of state, of music, and gardening. “Conduct” in some contexts is synonymous with “culture.”


The tradition of landscape and garden history, exemplified in Evelyn’s book, saw the “conduct of water” in all its complexity. Fountains, bodily plumbing, water clocks, water jokes, and the practicalities of irrigation and hydraulics are celebrated for their defiance of two-dimensional notions of meaning. The Baroque imagination swirled, folded back upon itself in catastrophic leaps and falls. The great garden scene is not a self-contained piece of reality, but a passing show in which the beholder has the good luck to participate for a moment.

While living in Rome, I was able to visit and shoot digital video of the famous gardens of Villa D'Este. I chose late fall and a cloudy day to emphasize the architecture of stone, and of water. Upon viewing the tapes, the soundtrack of the water seemed to rise up and drown the images; no matter how I manipulated the video, the sound of water won out over the stone. Finally, I decoupled sound and image in the installation.

Poetry was integral to this project from its inception. My inspiration for the inclusion of particular texts came from a book on fluid mechanics written by an unusual scientist, Chia-Shun Yih. Yih’s colleague at the University of Michigan, the poet Donald Hall, has written of Yih’s unusual sensibility and affinity for the poetic. Yih’s text is elegantly spare, filled with graphs and algebraic equations and punctuated with carefully chosen poems in Chinese or French, and with painting of water and waves. I was struck by the rare ability of the engineer and the poet to utilize two very different, but nevertheless precise, languages when speaking of water. The figure of poet/engineer was conducive.


Finally, it is digitality itself that is the subject of this installation. Just as the digital image has blurred the distinction between photography and painting, digital sound has blurred the distinction between “abstract” and “concrete” sounds. As the body of the observer moves through the installation and back to world outside, perhaps it will be moved to hear differently and to reconsider the relationship between sound and image:
image
of water, a brightness
not gold, not silver,
rippling
as if with laughter.*

*Denise Levertov (Other texts used are by Richard Wilbur, Lao-Tzu, Willard Quine, Toni Morrison, Fung Yen-Sze, Pablo Neruda, and Wallace Stevens)
Daniel Warner
2003

Hortus Musicus

None more admires, the painter’s magic skill,
Who shows me that which I shall never see,
Conveys a distant country into mine,
And throws Italian light on English walls.

William Cowper
The Task

Hortus Musicus (Musical Garden) takes its departure from what is, for me, a fascinating connection between landscape painting and garden history. This history brings to light how much our notions of “beautiful” gardens and “natural” landscapes were formed by a group of seventeenth century landscape painters working in Italy: Claude Lorrain, Nicholas Poussin, and Gaspard Dughet. Their idealized visions of the countryside around Rome with their intricate relationship of water, distant hills, classical ruins, bridges, and trees shaped the thought and discourse around garden design and, ultimately, the aesthetics of natural scenery.


The garden historian John Dixon Hunt has suggested that the history of landscape painting might be written in terms of the process by which a distinction between real and ideal landscape disappeared: “The aesthetic values created by artists in their ideal landscapes were transferred to their topographical pictures. From there it was an easy step to transfer the same values to natural scenery itself, to find the same kinds of enjoyment in actual views as in ideal prospects, and to associate with external nature the moods imparted by landscapists to their canvases.” Even more interesting is the fact that later eighteenth century English landscape painters such as John Wootton were known for cross-synthesizing English rural scenes with Italian light and shade.


Sound also became an important theme in historic gardening. Fountains, for example, were employed not only as visual references to classical antiquity, but to provide a sonic representation of “the bucolic.” In the late twentieth century, we have recently begun to pay attention to the ways in which sound constructs us as human subjects and locates us in particular social and cultural contexts.


Picking up on the notion of cross-synthesis, Hortus Musicus is about the construction of speculative landscapes and soundscapes by the cross-synthesis of disparate environmental elements (“Italian light on English walls” as per John Wootton). Via the technique of “convolution,” one passage, for example, presents the aural composite of an approaching subway train, Venetian boatmen, and a growling lion. The sound constantly shifts between real (concrete sound) and imaginary (computer-generated sound) ambient environments. The visual material for the installation consists of real-time transformations of my own landscape photographs and digitized images of Lorrain and Poussin. My installation argues for the transformative possibility of blurring the distinctions between real and imagined visual/sonic ambient environments. But, transformative in what way? In the same way that the art of landscape painting shapes a discourse on our visual environment, sound art has within it the possibility of reconfiguring our daily sonic experience, expanding its meanings and its pleasures.

Daniel Warner
April 2001

No Alla Guerra Imperialista, Wall of Sound, digital
photograph, inkjet print, 3'x4', 2001/2005.

Wall of Sound

Je cris, j'ecris ("I cry out, I write")
--Paris graffiti, 1968

Graffiti is a "sounding" even as we read it. What is called graffiti has its origins in very specific social and architectural spaces from Pompeii to Paris. Let us call the condition for rough graphic urban display, "the wall." In 1968, the mural writing that filled Paris decried the social order in general, but in Rome most vociferous graffiti at the time was written on and over ceremonial and monumental spaces, covering the square sans-serif typography and layout rules ordered by Mussolini as the official lettering of Fascism. Now, inscriptions can be found throughout the city, some echoing central political concerns, but they are more often located on the walls of the cultural periphery, "left to proliferate in the midst of silence and indifference."[1]


These digital images and recordings were made in autumn, 2001, shortly after my plane from Boston set down in Rome at the very hour that the Trade Towers were destroyed. They were written before the outpouring of affection and support for New York and Americans turned to suspicion, fear, and strong opposition to the impending invasion of Afghanistan. Some of the wall writers prefigured what three years later would be much louder protest against the invasion of Iraq. These public letters echo street protests against imperialism, international political figures (Jaques Chirac), the rich, entrenched political parties, the new Nazism targeting immigrants, the imposition of McDonald's, the dollar, nuclear testing, etc. They also filled the walls of Rome with ancient cries of love in many languages, obscenities, sexual name-calling, and in my neighborhood, nasty slurs against arch-rivals like Lazio found on the walls of soccer fanatics ("Forza Roma").

In some neighborhoods, as Petrucci notes, new patches of mural writing are the work of a new semi-literate subproletarian youth, who have learned that obscenities and sports slogans "can be not only shouted but also written on walls."[2] Although there are some similarities, I would argue that urban graffiti in the U.S. does not "sound" in the same embodied fullness. Except for the initiated (the taggers themselves, police, fans) graffiti remains abstract, decorative—an urban visual culture. Unlike the rather plain and unadorned lettering found in Rome, "graffiti art" in New York is often signed and displayed in conventional art spaces.


The ambient culture created by these displays are not only cries of protest and defiance but, like the five Roman soundscapes placed with them, they are also whispers in blurred languages, of love, fear, humor and simple equations of power and culture. Graffiti is somewhat misnamed in the age of spray paint; or else we might better recognize the "scratch" buried in its etymology. Scratching, of course, is a by now a conventional sound practice! Like the "stylus" that reads the grooves on records, we may regard ambient culture--including all of the soundscape--as the opportunity to listen and read creatively and publicly. Rather than understanding ambient culture as a kind of layered "noise," this installation argues for embracing its changing possibilities as "readable" sonic and visual palimpsests, one set over the other, another crowding out something else, yet another slowly fading into memory.



[1] Petrucci, Armando, Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture, trans. Linda Lappin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 129.
[2] Ibid., p.128.

Daniel Warner
August 2005

Stop ai Test Nucleari (Stop Nuclear Testing) Wall of Sound,
digital photograph, inkjet print, 3'x4', 2001/2005.